Payment cards such as credit cards have been widely used nowadays to facilitate financial transactions. Many people use credit cards to make automatic payments for utility bills, membership dues, newspaper/magazine subscriptions, online services, and other periodic charges. For example, a credit card customer may provide his/her card information to a merchant. The merchant then saves the card information in a bill processing system and charges the card every billing cycle (e.g., every week, month, quarter, year, etc.).
While this automatic payment process provides convenience to the customer, it may also cause problems when, for example, the customer decides to discontinue the automatic payment. In some cases, even if the customer has notified the merchant to stop charging the card, some merchants may continue charging the card using the stored card information. In current payment card systems, the customer must dispute every individual unauthorized charge, after the merchant makes that unauthorized charge, or, must close the card account all together. This causes great inconvenience to the customer.
Thus, there is a need for systems and methods capable of preventively blocking charges from a merchant to a card user's payment account.